Chief Digital Officer

Outdoor Life Group is a thriving group of European players in garden timber and garden cabins. The group is on the verge of a digital transformation to increase customer satisfaction, generate efficiencies, and harvest synergies between players. The Chief Digital Officer will integrate and monitor the decentralized digital activities to drive the transformation strategy forward.

About Outdoor Life Group

Outdoor Life Group (OLG) is a European market leader in producing and distributing garden timber and cabins. Their product categories range from decking and fences to play equipment and decoration. DIY retailers, e-tailers, professionals, and consumers from all over Europe call upon OLG for their wide range of products and associated services. OLG generated over three hundred million euros in 2021 through its nine hundred committed employees.

The international company consists of several well-established European players, working together in a decentralized model. They have four business units: Retail, Consumer, Professional, and Products. The business units are active in countries all over Europe: from Estonia, Poland, Hungary, and Norway to Germany and the Netherlands. Each unit has its own management team and operational strategy, including category management, innovation agenda, product development, branding, digital application stack, and organization design.

“Outdoor Life Group consists of business units with separate agendas for growth and digital innovation. There are countless synergies and there is a real need to harvest them.” – Edwin van den Berg, CEO of Outdoor Life Group

The new Chief Digital Officer (CDO) will be part of the Senior Leadership Team and report to the CEO.

Vacancy: Chief Digital Officer

OLG sees ample opportunities to increase its degree of automation to become the digital leader in the market of outdoor products. They will increase customer satisfaction and topline growth while generating cost/capital reductions and synergies within the group. As the central leader of the digital strategy, the Chief Digital Officer will integrate initiatives across all separate business units to close any digital performance gaps. They will be the digital business partner to the CEO and the managing directors of each business unit.

Where meaningful, the CDO will integrate the digital initiatives of these business units and support and launch group initiatives that have collective company value. They will collaborate with each department to overlook the execution of strategy, business plans, and budgets. Given OLG’s growth ambitions, an important part of the responsibility will be to perform due diligence and define integration plans for M&A or greenfield initiatives.

“The CDO will be our cross-functional change agent. The intermediary between the business unit managers and the central management team, to fully integrate our business opportunities with technology.” – Edwin van den Berg, CEO of Outdoor Life Group

The CDO will drive and measure ROI on OLG’s portfolio of digital solutions for products, services, processes, customer experiences, marketing, and business models. OLG will make extensive investments in each division’s full-stack e-commerce platform. In addition, the business units will build a common ERP backbone. They will also work on a solid cross-group process for managing product-related data (PIM and DAM), applications to strengthen customer interaction (including CRM), and technologies to enable Industry 4.0 principles in manufacturing locations and groupwide supply chains.

The CDO will integrate all of these (and other) digital initiatives into the strategic planning, ensuring leadership commitment, partnership selection and contracting, resource allocation, and execution. For major transitions, they will steer or carry senior project management responsibilities to ensure on-time project delivery within budget.

In addition, the CDO will be responsible for expanding the full digital ecosystem, tapping into competencies and innovations across and beyond the organization and its stakeholders. They will be in charge of developing digital talent, working closely with HR to attract and retain top employees to build digital capability across the company.

Interested?

Outdoor Life Group has appointed Top of Minds to fill this vacancy.
To express your interest, please contact Jessica Lim at jessica.lim@topofminds.com.